Six Blind Men & an Alien by Mike Resnick Read Free Book Online Page B

looked at the viewscreen. The polar bear was laying down-not sleeping, just patiently waiting-outside the hatch.
        He checked it every few hours. The bear was still there. By midnight he’d been joined by another, and by sunrise there were a total of five polar bears surrounding the ship.
        "This is intolerable," announced Nibolante. "We clearly cannot live here. I don’t want my children to go armed every time they leave the ship."
        "It would have been fun !" protested Sallassine.
        "Until you were eaten," replied Nibolante. "I must study the computer and decide where we will move to."
        "Don’t forget that there is a terrible war going on," said Marbovi.
        "I know. For that reason I think we can eliminate the continents called Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. And we cannot live on the southern polar cap. That leaves two land masses, Africa and South America. Now, they were fighting in the north of Africa, but the computer tells me that it has been resolved."
        "Is everyone on this world warlike?" said Marbovi.
        " We aren’t, and I must find a place where we’ll be safe." He studied the computer further. "South America seems free from this conflict, but it is populated by the same species as the rest of the world."
        "Isn’t Africa?" asked Marbovi.
        "Yes, of course," answered Nibolante. "I doubt that either continent would welcome us, but I think I’ve found a place where we can be relatively safe."
        "Where?"
        "There is a mountain in Africa, the tallest on the continent. It is in a thinly populated area, relatively few people live on it, those who do live on it live primarily on the lower sections. It had a huge ice cap, which can be seen literally fifty miles away, and no one lives above the tree line." Suddenly he smiled. "And there are no polar bears."
        "If it is a mountaintop, there are clearly no oceans," she said. "So what will we eat?"
        "There are dozens of game species on the mountain, some huge, some tiny, most of them edible. And there are streams and rivers filled with fish. And avians everywhere."
        "And these warlike beings are just going to let you walk right in and kill and eat their prey animals?" Marbovi said sarcastically.
        "Not everyone is armed with nuclear weapons," answered Nibolante. "From what I can gather, the residents of the mountain, indeed of the entire area, are a pastoral people who hunt and defend themselves with spears and bows and arrows."
        "They can kill you just as dead with a spear or an arrow."
        He smiled, got up, walked to a bulkhead, touched a particular spot on it, and the top slid back. He reached in and withdrew a set of goggles.
        "These enable me to see in the dark as easily as in the daylight," he said. "They have nothing similar, and there are some dangerous animals on the mountain. I will hunt at nights, while they sleep." He paused. "You look dubious."
        "We are leaving here because there are dangerous animals, and now you want to move to where there are more dangerous animals."
        "There is a difference," he said. "The polar bears live on fish and the very few mammals they can find up here. But on the mountain, there are literally tens of thousands of herbivores. It means, first, that there will be enough food for us, and second, that no carnivores will wait for us outside the ship simply because there are no other prey animals."
        She made no further comment, and he instructed the ship to lay in a course for Kilimanjaro. The planet’s inhabitants had developed a primitive form of radar, but he knew the ship would be able to avoid or deflect it. It reached the mountain in the middle of the night, hovered above the top while its sensors sought out a flat area halfway up the glacier, and then gently lowered itself until it came to rest on the snow.
        Nibolante used the ship’s sensors to make